Scripture and Wifely Submission

Our epistle from Colossians contains that famously controversial passage about wives being subject to their husbands. I confess to find the subject a bit wearisome, because I grew up in a Protestant evangelical tradition which found it hard to distinguish between leadership and tyranny. Somehow they, along with many of their contemporary heirs, including many people in so-called conservative circles, both Catholic and Protestant, delighted in digging into the discomfort that modern people, especially and obviously women, felt reading St. Paul, making it really a point of pride that the apostle be every bit as much of a misogynist as they feared. Then, on the other hand, I spent a fair amount of my adult life in more mainline liberal theological circles where it was taken for granted that obviously this was just one of those verses that needed to be either ignored or explicated out of existence with contextualizing commentaries about Paul’s captivity to the inequalities of the Greco-Roman world. No need to explain what Paul meant. He was just clearly wrong so we should ignore him.

Neither of these views is very satisfactory to a serious Catholic. I do want to say more about what St. Paul does and does not mean, but first let me frame those questions with the gospel for today’s feast of the Holy Family. For this Sunday in the Christmas Octave we always get stories about Jesus’ obedience to his parents. That is an interesting subject in itself. But this year we get the flight to Egypt and St. Matthew’s unusual emphasis on St. Joseph’s role. Just last Sunday we reflected on Joseph’s quiet courage and leadership, his ability to listen to God and obey God even in the face of confusion or uncertainty, his role in redeeming Adam’s failure in the garden through his protection and love for the New Eve. And in this next chapter of the gospel, immediately after the story of the magi, we see Joseph again courageously taking up that mantle of leadership that must have felt very strange for him. After all, he was asked to guard and lead the immaculate Mother of God and her incarnate divine Son. What a strange feeling that must have been! And this brings me to the connection between this gospel and the epistle that was perhaps in the Church’s mind pairing them together: whatever it means for wives to be subject to their husbands, it must be something like what it meant for the holy Virgin and the incarnate Son of God to be subject to St. Joseph.

So right off the bat we can rule out some things. This is no tyranny, no “I’m the man so I’m better than you and you have to do what I say” mentality. There’s no implication that Joseph is somehow better than Mary or Jesus, that Mary or Jesus lack wisdom or courage or intelligence or even power. Joseph has a role and he fulfills it. I’ve seen some Catholic thinkers speculate that the natural fittingness of husbands as head of the family is almost like a grace and a mercy to those who otherwise would be the least important part of family life. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it tracks a bit with Joseph, because he isn’t needed in the way that Mary and Jesus are, yet they choose to place themselves in his care. They give his life meaning and purpose. The difference of his station is valued.

Which leads to the first big qualification of Colossians 3:18. This is not some kind of prescription for men and women in general. St. Paul does not say “all women must submit to all men.” It describes husbands and wives and the order of a family. But the principle of submission here does rely on a basic assumption that men and women are different and therefore not simply interchangeable. Women are not just men who can have babies; men are not just women who can’t. We are two different kinds of human beings. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t social constructions and conventions and roles that change and evolve in time and place. The cruel absurdity of our age is that, probably in reaction to a moment where mainstream culture had calcified certain arbitrary gender roles, we felt that we had to reject all roles and differences as if they were all make-believe. And so the instinct among certain conservative folks is to swing back hard in the other direction, but it’s not going to work if it ends up at the opposite extreme of arbitrary tyranny.

But back to the point: wives should be subject to their husbands. Elsewhere the apostles writes that they should “obey” their husbands. Again I’m struck by today’s feast day resonances with the obedience of St. Joseph and our Lord himself who is always subject to the will of his Father. What does it mean to “obey,” or to be subject to? It certainly doesn’t mean to lose one’s dignity or to take on the status of an inferior. Obedience in Greek means to “listen under,” and in the Romance languages, where that word “obedience” comes to us from the French and the Latin, it means something like to listen to, to heed. Obedience then, for wives, is a matter of guarding and valuing the leadership of their husbands in the family, seeing themselves not as competitors for authority but as the most important member of his team. Though there have been many men in history who want to distort this command into some sort of unthinking, servile passivity, that is not what St. Paul actually says. Some writers talk about “submission” as being literally “under” the “mission,” that is, the mission of the husband and father to lead the family to heaven. So Peter Kreeft, for example, suggests that the wife’s obedience to the husband’s leadership is itself subject to that fundamental condition — that the husband is being faithful to his mission. When he strays from that mission a wife should rightly say “I must obey God not men.”

Another way of putting it is that the wife’s obedience to her husband is only as virtuous and as effective as the husband’s own obedience to God. His role is to model obedience for his family, to model submission. Like St. Joseph, he must listen to God. And, like St. Joseph, to listen he must often be silent.

If St. Joseph is a model for husbands and fathers, he is also a type for all Christians, for we are all called to nurture, cherish, and protect the life of Christ that has been given to us in Baptism and in the Blessed Sacrament. The Lord comes to us not first as a conquering hero but as a child; then, as a tiny portion of bread. Like to St. Joseph, he has made himself subject to us: but can we learn to obey him? He is no tyrant, but the true king and prince of peace.